One of Ours - Willa Cather (great book club books .TXT) 📗

her sons, they laughed and liked Claude better. His steady, protecting air was a frame for the gay little picture she made.

The dinner party came off the next evening. The guest of honour, Madame Wilhelmina Schroeder-Schatz, was some years younger than her cousin, Augusta Erlich. She was short, stalwart, with an enormous chest, a fine head, and a commanding presence. Her great contralto voice, which she used without much discretion, was a really superb organ and gave people a pleasure as substantial as food and drink. At dinner she sat on the right of the oldest son. Claude, beside Mrs. Erlich at the other end of the table, watched attentively the lady attired in green velvet and blazing rhinestones.

After dinner, as Madame Schroeder-Schatz swept out of the dining room, she dropped her cousin’s arm and stopped before Claude, who stood at attention behind his chair.

“If Cousin Augusta can spare you, we must have a little talk together. We have been very far separated,” she said.

She led Claude to one of the window seats in the living-room, at once complained of a draft, and sent him to hunt for her green scarf. He brought it and carefully put it about her shoulders; but after a few moments, she threw it off with a slightly annoyed air, as if she had never wanted it. Claude with solicitude reminded her about the draft.

“Draft?” she said lifting her chin, “there is no draft here.”

She asked Claude where he lived, how much land his father owned, what crops they raised, and about their poultry and dairy. When she was a child she had lived on a farm in Bavaria, and she seemed to know a good deal about farming and livestock. She was disapproving when Claude told her they rented half their land to other farmers. “If I were a young man, I would begin to acquire land, and I would not stop until I had a whole county,” she declared. She said that when she met new people, she liked to find out the way they made their living; her own way was a hard one.

Later in the evening Madame Schroeder-Schatz graciously consented to sing for her cousins. When she sat down to the piano, she beckoned Claude and asked him to turn for her. He shook his head, smiling ruefully.

“I’m sorry I’m so stupid, but I don’t know one note from another.”

She tapped his sleeve. “Well, never mind. I may want the piano moved yet; you could do that for me, eh?”

When Madame Schroeder-Schatz was in Mrs. Erlich’s bedroom, powdering her nose before she put on her wraps, she remarked, “What a pity, Augusta, that you have not a daughter now, to marry to Claude Melnotte. He would make you a perfect son-in-law.”

“Ah, if I only had!” sighed Mrs. Erlich.

“Or,” continued Madame Schroeder-Schatz, energetically pulling on her large carriage shoes, “if you were but a few years younger, it might not yet be too late. Oh, don’t be a fool, Augusta! Such things have happened, and will happen again. However, better a widow than to be tied to a sick man⁠—like a stone about my neck! What a husband to go home to! and I a woman in full vigour. Das ist ein Kreuz ich trage!” She smote her bosom, on the left side.

Having put on first a velvet coat, then a fur mantle, Madame Schroeder-Schatz moved like a galleon out into the living room and kissed all her cousins, and Claude Wheeler, good night.

XI

One warm afternoon in May Claude sat in his upstairs room at the Chapins’, copying his thesis, which was to take the place of an examination in history. It was a criticism of the testimony of Jeanne d’Arc in her nine private examinations and the trial in ordinary. The Professor had assigned him the subject with a flash of humour. Although this evidence had been pawed over by so many hands since the fifteenth century, by the phlegmatic and the fiery, by rhapsodists and cynics, he felt sure that Wheeler would not dismiss the case lightly.

Indeed, Claude put a great deal of time and thought upon the matter, and for the time being it seemed quite the most important thing in his life. He worked from an English translation of the Procès, but he kept the French text at his elbow, and some of her replies haunted him in the language in which they were spoken. It seemed to him that they were like the speech of her saints, of whom Jeanne said, “the voice is beautiful, sweet and low, and it speaks in the French tongue.” Claude flattered himself that he had kept all personal feeling out of the paper; that it was a cold estimate of the girl’s motives and character as indicated by the consistency and inconsistency of her replies; and of the change wrought in her by imprisonment and by “the fear of the fire.”

When he had copied the last page of his manuscript and sat contemplating the pile of written sheets, he felt that after all his conscientious study he really knew very little more about the Maid of Orleans than when he first heard of her from his mother, one day when he was a little boy. He had been shut up in the house with a cold, he remembered, and he found a picture of her in armour, in an old book, and took it down to the kitchen where his mother was making apple pies. She glanced at the picture, and while she went on rolling out the dough and fitting it to the pans, she told him the story. He had forgotten what she said⁠—it must have been very fragmentary⁠—but from that time on he knew the essential facts about Joan of Arc, and she was a living figure in his mind. She seemed to him then as clear as now, and now as miraculous as then.

It was a curious thing, he reflected, that a character could